Building a BPM Business at #bpmNEXT

I had the honor of participating in a panel on building a business in BPM, alongside Silver Tree’s Jonathan Sapir and Princeton Blue’s Pramod Sachdeva. SilverTree (~20 people) is focused on Salesforce, while Princeton Blue (~35 ppl – correction: Pramod reminds me that when you include their India office it is ~70 ppl) works with IBM, Appian, and Pega, while BP3 (~100 ppl) is primarily known for our work with IBM BPM and Lombardi, though we’ve also done some implementations leveraging open source BPM engines.

The panel wasn’t asked about the current state of the business, so we didn’t get into details of revenue and growth and opportunities in a business sense, or the challenges of building a business around someone else’s software. But we did talk about the opportunities for creating value for customers, and our various approaches to doing so.

We had a good discussion of skills – what skills do you need and how do you hire for them. I can recap my answer as follows: What you want to prioritize first is to hire someone who cares about business, and about your business, as much as they do about coding and technical output. I don’t fixate on a specific technical or coding skill because I believe you can learn any coding language once you know one or two.

We all share a sense of optimism about the building a business in the BPM space. When the conversation turned to Artificial Intelligence and BPM, it reminded me of an old computer science joke: “artificial intelligence is what you call it until it works – and then you call it something else… like Search.”

Translated for BPM: “BPM is what you call it until it is a market, and then you call it something else… like CRM, or Digitial Experience.” And if you’re building a business, that’s okay – there’s time to make the market.